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Jump Lists

Jump Lists are a new Windows 7 Taskbar feature that gives the user quick access to recently accessed application files and actions.

Jump Lists come in multiple flavors:

automatic (autodest, or *.automaticDestinations-ms) files

custom (custdest, or *.customDestinations-ms) files

Autodest files are created by the operating system.

The Jump Lists are located in the user profile path:

C:\Users\%USERNAME%\Recent\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Recent\

Where the autodest Jump Lists are located in the automaticDestinations subdirectory, and custdest Jump Lists in the customDestinations subdirectory.

Note: Jump Lists can prove to be considerably valuable during an examination, as the files appear (in limited testing) to persist after the application itself is removed from the system. In one test, iTunes 10 was installed on a 64-bit Windows 7 system, and two audio files (i.e., CyberSpeak podcasts) were launched via iTunes. The Jump Lists persisted after the iTunes was removed from the system.

Structure

Each of the hexadecimal numbered streams contains data similar of that of a Windows Shortcut. One could extract all the streams and analyze them with a LNK parser.

The "DestList" stream acts as a most recently/frequently used (MRU/MFU) list. This stream consists of a 32-byte header, followed by the various structures that correspond to each of the individual numbered streams. Each of these structures is 114 bytes in size, followed by a variable length Unicode string. The first 114 bytes of the structure contains the following information at the corresponding offsets:

Offset

Size

Description

0x48

16 bytes

NetBIOS name of the system; padded with zeros to 16 bytes

0x58

8 bytes

Stream number; corresponds to the numbered stream within the jump list

Tools

TZWorks LLC: Windows Jump List Parser (jmp). Also has a tool that can parse both the custom and automatic Destinations type files. For automaticDestinations it associates the MRU/MFU metadata with that of the SHLLINK metadata. There are versions of the tool that can run in Windows, Linux or Mac OS-X.

Woanware: JumpLister. Tool to view the information within the numbered streams of each autodest file.